Busy Days and Amazing Food

We all have a certain busyness in our lives that can can move us toward burnout if we choose to let it. My solution is to create lists. Everything I need and want to accomplish goes on these lists. Once a job is on the list it gets prioritized. If a job isn’t a high priority it will get moved to next weeks list. I give myself the grace to feel accomplishment even if every item is not checked off the list. I know that if an item stays on the list for a few weeks it is not likely that important to accomplish.

You might be juggling a job and family life. Trying to sort out the new protocols that come with living during a pandemic. Figuring out what life looks like for your children as they return to school. Or maybe its how you will get through another year of homeschooling that you were thrown into this year. After homeschooling ourselves since 1992 I understand the challenges that it takes to learn this new skill. It was not always easy, but it was definitely worth the effort.

COVID19 is teaching us many new things. This year has taught us how to pivot our farm plans quickly. We do our farm planning in the early winter. This gives us our road map for the year. We plan how many animals will have to be raised to meet our customers needs. We plan what vegetables and how much will be planted. Or if we will be planting any more fruit trees and bushes.

As they say “the best laid plans are meant to be changed.” We have all seen the shortages that occurred in the food supply this year. We started seeing a shortage of meat in the supermarkets in March. April saw garden seeds almost impossible to find.

Oven roasted potatoes, Italian seasoned zucchini, and pan fried pasture-raised pork chops seasoned with homemade seasoning salt then topped with fried onions.

In response we raised more chickens and added to our veggie gardens. Our on-farm meat processing facility that we process all our farm-raised animals in became an almost full time job. This has moved us into a new part of our business; hiring employees. This has been a step learning curve. Who new that it was such an art to create an ad that would attract the right person for the job” This fall we will be expanding our gardens and the raspberry plantings.

One of my rewards is getting to eat of the fruits of our labours. There is so much good food coming from the gardens. We have been preserving much of it for use in the winter. I am not someone to plan a weeks worth of meals. I love being able to walk through the garden with a basket in hand deciding what we will have for dinner.

I already had our pasture-raised pork thawed. So I headed for the garden to see what I could find. Onions, garlic, potatoes, green and yellow zucchini. Apples and rhubarb for a fruit crisp. So what was I to do with all this goodness? It had to be simple and quick, which it was.

Check out this simple recipe for Homemade Seasoning Salt. I use this on many different foods. I do omit the sugar.